William Blake英国, 1757–1827The Canterbury Pilgrims
关于作品
Those with devout hearts set out on medieval pilgrimages, but these journeys could also be experienced in social fellowship. The visionary English artist William Blake’s enormous frieze contains all 29 of Geoffrey Chaucer’s boisterous Canterbury Tales pilgrims, as well as a portrait of the author himself. In Chaucer’s book, each character tells stories while passing time along the way from London to Canterbury Cathedral, a pilgrimage route that rivaled the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Blake devoted reams of paper to advertise this print, describing Chaucer’s Tales as “the physiognomy or elements of universal human life.”
芝加哥藝術博物館CC BY 4.0
作品信息
- 馆藏编号
- 1991.613
已收入目录
出处
- 芝加哥藝術博物館
- 图片： 芝加哥藝術博物館 — CC0
与此同时，在William Blake的生活中
完整生平1780–1808
Exhibits six times at the Royal Academy
Despite his antagonism towards Reynolds, Blake submitted works to the Royal Academy on six occasions between 1780 and 1808.
1803年10月–1820 · 居住
South Molton Street
c. 1808
Polemical annotations to Reynolds's “Discourses”
Around 1808 Blake gave vigorous expression to his views on art in an extensive series of polemical annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's “Discourses”, denouncing the Royal Academy as a fraud and proclaiming that to generalise is to be an idiot.
1809
An exhibition in his brother's shop: nothing sold
Blake set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in Soho to market his version of “The Canterbury Pilgrims” along with other works. It was very poorly attended, sold none of the temperas or watercolours, and its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile.
1809
The “Descriptive Catalogue”: an analysis of Chaucer
For the exhibition Blake wrote his “Descriptive Catalogue” (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt called a “brilliant analysis” of Chaucer and is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism; it also contains detailed explanations of his other paintings.
